 You hear it every day, go green, recycle. People think they're doing their part by dumping recyclables in their own designated areas. But what happens to the heaps of recyclable products after their users bid them farewell? When your truck comes in and dumps all of the material, it gets tipped on the floor. From the floor it then goes up the processing of a conveyor belt. At the top of the conveyor belt are manual sorters, people who are actually separating out the material. In 2009, Boston made this process a little easier by implementing the single stream system for recycling. Although some buildings still do have the sorting signs, it's not imperative to sort. The single stream system allows for that to happen in the plant. Your steel cans are pulled out magnetically, so you have a big magnet that spins, captures the steel and then releases it into a separate bunker. You have your optical sorting where the picture is taken of the item, identified as a one or two, and then blown into a separate stream and run across a conveyor for processing. Sorting in the factory is heavily machine based, with roughly 90% of the work done by machines and only 10% by man. There is still a lot of manual labor, so you have sorters that are there picking out contamination. So in the news, you're picking out a lot of the brown paper that doesn't belong. They pull out anything out of the plastic that doesn't belong. From the plant recyclables are taken elsewhere to be reprocessed and repurposed. For example, aluminum cans like these are taken to the plant reprocessed and distributed and can be back on the shelves as aluminum cans within 90 days. We will process roughly 400 to 500 tons a day. So if we're hitting on all cylinders, we could do up to 500 tons a day. The former system is the dual system where you just separate your cans from your bottles from your paper and keep it separate in containers, but also the hauler will have to keep it separated as well. Once you move from the dual stream to the single stream, there's been up words of 30% increase in participation, increase in collection of volume, and because of that increase, we've seen the single stream be much more effective. Any areas have migrated towards the single stream system to bask in the benefits, but is this plan perfect? There's a number of contaminants that get in from different streams, whether it's the residential or the commercial stream, and we try to manually take those out as well. So constantly trying to stay within the 10% of what we call contamination or error of margin. Despite the slim margin for contamination, recycling efforts are not a lost cause. Based on November 2012 numbers, the Department of New England has conserved electricity, oil, gasoline, trees, water, and they've even cleaned up some space in the landfill. For BU TV 10, I'm Erica Stapleton.